I’ve been struggling with Vista on a Dell D420 laptop recently. It is described as “Vista Capable”. It is nothing of the sort. So tonight I reverted back to XP Pro and have started the long slow re-install of all my favourite applications. This is what I pretty much always install on XP machines now:

• Windows XP SP2 plus all updates
• Internet Explorer 7
• Firefox (plus some standard add-ons)
• KeePass password manager
• Nokia N-Series PC Suite
• PDFCreator
• AVG Anti-Virus
• Microsoft Office 2007
• Adobe Acrobat Reader
• Pidgin Instant Messenger
• Filezilla FTP Client
• Skype
• OpenOffice
• Sun Java JDK
• Putty SSH Client
• MySQL Tools
• Adobe Flash
• Adobe Shockwave (no idea why I need this!)
• Activestate Python 2.5 (plus a bunch of modules)
• Adobe AIR
• Twhirl Twitter Client
• Google Toolbar x2
• Google Gears
• Azureus Bittorrent Client
• JungleDisk Amazon S3 Backup
• Paint.NET
• Subversion version control
• bzr version control
• Flock Browser
• Quicktime (only when needed)
• RealPlayer (or Real Alternative)

Any other interesting ones you use?